Which phones are better buys than the Samsung Galaxy Note 8?

SMARTPHONES have pretty much reached saturation point: everyone who wants one, has one. That's why so much research and development effort is going into making newer and better ones.
The £225 Honor 6x phone has a dual-lens camera on the backThe £225 Honor 6x phone has a dual-lens camera on the back
The £225 Honor 6x phone has a dual-lens camera on the back

The next few months will see a slew of new models with faster processors, bigger screens and more features, to tempt you into upgrading. Some of the technology is useful; a lot of it is pie in the sky. Until your bank absolutely insists on scanning your fingerprint every time you log in, for instance, there is precious little point in having a scanner on your handset.

However, a sensible upgrade will nearly always improve your experience. Choose wisely and your new phone will last three or more years, and if you run it on a SIM-only deal, you’ll save a packet on the standard contract price.

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The 2017 features most likely to future-proof your new device are the same ones you’d have looked for in a desktop PC in days gone by: a better processor and more memory. Dual-core and even quad-core processing chips are passé now; octa-core processors can handle eight sets of instructions simultaneously and are available on even moderately priced handsets. Likewise, three or even four gigabytes of memory should be your baseline.

The Nokia 3310 from the 1990s has been brought up to dateThe Nokia 3310 from the 1990s has been brought up to date
The Nokia 3310 from the 1990s has been brought up to date

If you use your phone to take pictures, pay attention to the camera specification, but look beyond the headline megapixel count. All phones have more than enough pixels to take a picture; it’s the way they process the image that’s important.

In this respect, the most significant feature this year is the dual-lens camera. That’s three lenses if you count the selfie-cam on the front. The extra one on the back is there to capture detail that the regular lens would miss, or to take the same picture from a slightly different angle, or with a different exposure. The two images are then fused together to create a single, hopefully stunning, shot.

Currently, the best value handset embodying all these features if the Honor 6x from Huawei, which you can buy outright for £225 on Amazon and a few other sites. But within a few months, new models from Motorola, which will also be sold direct, may give it a run for its money.

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Further up the market, Samsung’s hopefully non-combustible Galaxy Note 8 is making its way onto the shelves, with a stylish, edge-to-edge screen only slightly short of six inches. It will be followed in the autumn by the tenth anniversary iPhone 8 from Apple, which is speculated to go one better with a screen that runs edge-to-edge from top to bottom, as well as well as left to right. £225 will barely buy you an accessory pack for it, though.

The Nokia 3310 from the 1990s has been brought up to dateThe Nokia 3310 from the 1990s has been brought up to date
The Nokia 3310 from the 1990s has been brought up to date

Where none of these phones have made much progress is in battery life - a full day’s use out of one is as much as you can reasonably expect. However, one new entrant has bucked the trend by actively stripping out features in favour of basic phone-and-text functionality and a few retro games.

The Finnish start-up company HMD has bought the rights to the Nokia 3310, a phone that was universally popular in the 1990s, and updated it to take account of the internet age. It doesn’t have the connectivity to be considered a smartphone, but it does sell for not much more than £40 and will keep its charge for around a month on standby. Whether that’s progress depends on how much you like to play Snake.

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